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.Waverly loses this battle, andafterward she never plays chess so successfully or confidently again.This series of events suggests that Waverly can have power only as longas she remains tied to and aligned with her mother; for Waverly, though,this power doesn t seem her own precisely because she remains under MY MOTHER, MY SELF 149her mother s control.To put it another way, Lindo cannot help Waverlylearn to manipulate the system because, for Waverly, Lindo is the system.Waverly s story suggests that, because the mother s power is experiencedby the daughter as a threatening force, the mother cannot transmitwhatever power she possesses to her daughter: instead, in keeping withthe zero-sum dynamic, the mother s power immediately becomespower over rather than power shared by the daughter.In a fashion thatperfectly metaphorizes the mutually exclusive vectors of past and future,the mother s strength cannot be shared with the daughter but ratherworks against her, such that the past still triumphs over the future.In every case, it seems, the past, in the form of the mother, overwhelmsthe future, in the form of the daughter.This sense of almost uncannyuniformity in the mother/daughter relationship is underscored in The JoyLuck Club by what Shirley Lim calls the mother s position as the figurenot only of maternality but also of racial consciousness. 25 The novelrepeatedly associates its vision of this racial consciousness withnonrational or magical models of cause and effect.26 One of the sectionsin the novel begins with a sort of parable that encapsulates the powerthis nonrational causality has in the novel: a mother tells her daughternot to ride her bike around the corner because a Chinese book calledThe Twenty-Six Malignant Gates says that bad things will happen to thedaughter away from her house.The daughter becomes frustrated whenthe mother refuses to explain what these bad things are and finallybegins to yell: You can t tell me because you don t know! You don t knowanything! And the girl ran outside, jumped on her bicycle, and in herhurry to get away, she fell before she even reached the corner (Tan 87,emphasis in original).Thus, the mysterious knowledge associated withthe Chinese book trumps the daughter s supposed agency, turning evenher defiance into a means of fulfilling its prophecy: whatever actionthe daughter takes still ends in reinforcing both the mysterious forcesof Chinese causality and the infallibility of the mother.That the motherand daughter are unnamed suggests the way that this vignette serves as akind of ur-narrative that underlies all the mother/daughter relationshipsin The Joy Luck Club.Behind the rational American version of causeand effect, the novel insists, a more mysterious set of forces is at work,bending any action to fit a predetermined outcome.Because this formof inexorable determination is associated with both the mother and aracial consciousness associated with the mother country, so to speak,it serves as a kind of metaphor for the power of the past: the inexorableweight of the past determines events much the way the mysterious,magical powers of a supposedly premodern Chinese causality do, 150 POPULAR FEMINIST FICTION AS AMERICAN ALLEGORYmolding what could have been different futures into the preformedimage of the past.The Joy Luck Club thematizes this sense of overdetermination throughits proliferation of mother/daughter pairs.As Dana Heller points out, Balance is structurally foregrounded [by the novel] in symmetricalpairings, a reiteration of fours.There are four mothers, four daughters,four directions, and four corners of the mah-jongg table. 27 Among thefour mother/daughter pairs, we also find a balanced set of oppositions:the novel depicts a mother who is a victim of the system of Chinesecausality (Ying-Ying), a mother who is a victim of the American systemof causality (An-Mei), a mother who is powerful in her manipulationof Chinese causality (Lindo), and a mother who is powerful in her beliefin American causality (Suyuan)
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Tematy
IndexJoel Fleishman The Foundation, A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World (2009)
Mark A. Noll, Luke E. Harlow Religion and American Politics, From the Colonial Period to the Present (2007)
Jesse Fox Mayshark Post pop cinema; The search for meaning in new America (2007)(1)
R. Murray Thomas Manitou and God, North American Indian Religions and Christian Culture (2007
Philip Gordon, Jeremy Shapiro Allies At War, America, Europe and the Crisis Over Iraq (2004)
Cathy J. Cohen Democracy Remixed, Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (2010)
Heather Cox Richardson West from Appomattox, The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007)
Patricia Allen Together At The Table, Sustainability And Sustenance In The American Agrifood System (2004)
Franklin Ariana Labirynt smierci
Watała Elwira Seks w królewskich alkowach